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News > Report from XI Symposium of the Ibero-Macaronesian Association of Botanic Gardens, June 2011

Report from XI Symposium of the Ibero-Macaronesian Association of Botanic Gardens, June 2011

PORTUGAL

18 July 2011

The XI Symposium of the Ibero-Macaronesian Association of Botanic Gardens (15 - 19 June 2011) , held at Jardim Botânico do Faial, Portugal has published its concluding statement, and included some photographs from its field trip to Capelinhos Volcano at the western end of Faial, one of the islands in the Azores.

The statement begins:

CONCORD OF FAIAL: CONCLUSIONS OF THE XI AIMJB SYMPOSIUM

Despite coordinated efforts of the world’s botanic gardens to save plant biodiversity, most of the 2010 targets of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) were not met, and biodiversity keeps declining as a consequence of continued and unprecedented biological and socio-economic threat factors, and ofglobal changes. About 2/3 of the planet's biodiversity may be endangered by 2050, and the GSPC adopted 16 new targets to be met by 2020 to mitigate the alarming decline in plant diversity, emphasizing the elaboration of online floras of all known plants, the assessment of conservation status, poverty reduction and sustainable development through the conservation of crops, their wild relatives and the associated ethnobotanical knowledge.

The XI Symposium brought together experts from botanical gardens to discuss the contribution of the Botanical Gardens in the recovery of degraded landscapes with invasive species. The symposium also included a field trip to Capelinhos Volcano at the western end of Faial, one of the islands in the Azores. Of particular interest was Festuca petraea (GrassBase entry, Catalogue of Life entry), an endemic plant of Azores and a pre coloniser of the black sands resultant of the volcanic eruption in 1957. According to Maria Dalila Espírito Santo, one of the symposium organisers, this species is stronger than any invasive species under these conditions.

Photographs of from the field trip to Capelinhos Volcano during the Symposium